Wander Dust (The Seraphina Parrish Trilogy #1)

Wander Dust by Michelle Warren
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Forewarning: I know not many days have passed since Maja reviewed this same book here, but I couldn't help it. This is why you want to read it:


Wander Dust is, in a nutshell, the love child of Jumper and Harry Potter.

This alone should make you dump everything you're reading and make you trigger-happy with your Amazon account. Well, aside from making you swoon just by thinking about Hayden Christensen... but I digress.

This is what I needed to lift me out of my reading slump!
I am in awe of Warren's fertile imagination, her plotting skills and her vivid descriptions. This is an author you definitely want to keep an eye on and I promise her book is certainly worth reading. And it's self-published! This must be the year of the Self-Pubbed Revolution!

The story starts with Seraphina celebrating her 16th birthday, in a restaurant, with her dad and his girlfriend. That's also when strange things start happening to her: candles igniting by themselves even underwater and a dark, dangerous looking lady trying to fry her brain just by looking at her.
When she receives the picture of a handsome guy in the mail and she discovers him stalking her at school, she just knows something's off.
After the umpteenth grounding by her father and a near-breakdown due to what she thinks are hallucinations, her father decides to send her to live with her aunt in Chicago and that's when she begins discovering the truth. Sera can time travel. When she starts attending the prestigious Academy, she learns she is a Wanderer, one-third of a team of time travelers, together with a Protector and a Seer. But when she realizes that her time traveling abilities might just lead her to her dead mother and help her change the past, trouble is sure to come her way.

Wander Dust is an ambitious book. It deals with time travel, a fact which, in itself, can potentially lead to disaster (as well as turning my brain to a mushy goo by trying to figure out the underlying theory).
If that weren't enough, its world-building is extremely sophisticated: different settings, real life places in which unreal, logic-defying action scenes take place; incredible, steampunk-ish magical inventions and relics which make time traveling possible. I loved it.
Fortunately, Warner delivers on both counts. She keeps her time traveling theory pretty simple, linear and very clear. I didn't have time to ask myself questions "but what if...?" because she'd already given an answer before they could take form in my mind.

Did I already say her world-building is amazing? I felt like a kid in a candy store just by following Seraphina inside the Academy. It occurred to me that I hadn't encountered such a good, imaginative, magic-ridden setting since the time of Harry Potter. The scenes in Venice (a city which I know very well) were accurate, realistic - an brownie points for not throwing at me misspelled, cheesy sentences in Italian. You could see she'd done her research there.

If even THAT weren't enough to convince you to pick up Wander Dust, rest assured this book will leave you breathless. It is so fast-paced, action-packed and full of great adventures you won't even have time to realize you're at the last chapter.
It's got good characters, a swoon-worthy guy and... ALERT! In my opinion, this book wins the Award for Best Kiss of the year, hands down!

I don't mean to be overly gushy and make you think this book is perfect, because it isn't. Like almost every other self-published book out there, it has a few editing issues BUT it's nothing major that a good professional editor could not quickly remedy and anyway, the story is just so good they didn't bother me at all.
It also has its fair share of clichés, in good old tradition of YA tropes. Nevertheless, it manages to be way, way better than a good part of the books I have read this year. This series has much potential I was really blown away.

I really can't wait for the second book to come out!